Of all SimCity's faults, the biggest was that, even when it was working, it was a very poor city simulator. Things essential to your planning - transport, land value, etc - seemed like they were either busted or running in a fantasy land.
Where most of us simply made sad faces, though, Anselm Eickhoff rolled up his sleeves and got to work.
"I began to research traffic simulation, read dozens of papers, familiarized myself with procedural city generation techniques, building on my existing knowledge and interest for procedural generation," he told Gamasutra. "I discovered that cities don't fascinate me just in games, but in general."
He's hard at work now building his own city-planning game, called Citybound. It's described as everything SimCity should have been but isn't, "a city-building game that could simulate large tracts of land, be played offline by a single player, and accept user-made modifications."
And while there's a long road ahead, the fact he's starting from a purist's starting point - not...wherever Maxis started with SimCity - he's already picked up a big following on his site and on Reddit.
Citybound is going to ship as a standalone browser game, which means it'll be "a standalone browser game that runs in a special version of Chrome on PC, Mac and Linux".
Citybound: One man's attempt to build a better SimCity [Gamasutra]
Citybound [Dev Blog]